Corpses Of Christmas Past

New York's Trees Bound For Mulch Pile

January 8, 2006|By Dan Barry The New York Times

New York — Tens of thousands of discarded Christmas trees sag in green heaps at the city's curbsides, joyless, desiccated, done. With boughs limp and trunks planted amid black bags of debris, they signal that January is here; deal with it.

You wish these scented, faintly irritating reminders of Christmas just past would simply disappear. The thing is, they do.

Shortly after midnight Friday, with Manhattan nestled all snug in its bed, a large white truck pulled away from a depot along the Hudson River and set out for the mostly deserted streets of the Upper West Side. Its red and yellow lights twinkled in festiveness or in warning, depending on your mood. In its cab sat Gary Baer and Marcus Ortiz, elves in Department of Sanitation green.

Tree duty isn't so bad, said Baer. "You go home smelling good."

"Except the needles get in your pants and hair," said Ortiz.

Baer, 33 and burly, spent Christmas with his wife and two children on Staten Island. Ortiz, 24 and fit -- he used to be a personal trainer -- enjoyed the day with his wife and in-laws at home in Brooklyn.

Around what kind of trees did they celebrate?

"Artificial," said Baer.

"Me too," said Ortiz.

Now, far from homes where Christmas trees will slide needle-free into storage, the two men began to prowl the streets for holiday detritus. It was Jan. 6: the Feast of the Epiphany, Three Kings Day, Little Christmas, the end of the season.

They found their first two trees at West End Avenue and 65th Street, on the ground as though overcome by too much cheer. A third leaned against a wall, exhausted. A fourth slumped outside a firehouse. The sanitation workers did not pause to imagine the Christmas carols and children's smiles the trees might have conjured. They just grabbed the trunks and heaved them into the truck's maw. Ortiz pulled a lever, and the truck ate the trees with grim purpose, the way one might eat a stale Christmas cookie.

A truck like theirs can compact several hundred trees into its hold, although the number depends, oddly, on the borough. A Sanitation Department survey once determined that Queens and Staten Island have the largest trees, probably because the boroughs have many single-family homes. Manhattan, island of cramped high-rises, has the smallest, meaning more trees to a truck.

The two men shook the needles from their clothes, climbed into the cab, and continued their mop-up roles in the city's annual Christmas pageant.

Every year at this time, sanitation trucks trawl New York City streets for pines and firs that have gone from being the center of attention to being the focus of anger -- space-eating nuisances -- in a matter of days, even hours. Last year, the city collected 156,000 of them for its Christmas Tree Collection program.

The city will not, however, collect the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, which this year is a 9-ton, 74-foot-tall Norway spruce. The private contractor who carried the monstrous evergreen in will, alas, have to carry it out.

Trees of more modest size are compacted in the trucks and taken to the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island or to Randalls Island, where they are fed into wood chippers. Their dusty remains are mixed with collected autumn leaves to create compost that is used in the city's parks, ball fields and community gardens, transforming their purpose from the aesthetic to the practical.

But Baer and Ortiz do more than simply pick up and toss. They have to make sure that people have stripped their trees of tinsel, tree stands and lights that would make them ineligible for composting. Trees that cling to vanity are destined for the dump.

By dawn the two men will have collected 452 trees.

The white truck pulled up to another mound of discarded trees. Baer reached into the pile and pulled out a wreath adorned with candy canes. He yanked the candies off and tossed the wreath like a green Frisbee into the hopper.